Local officials plan crackdown on fake IDs

Sunday

Apr 28, 2013 at 5:00 PM

Sending this message will be primarily done at UNCW freshman orientations

By Ashley WithersAshley.Withers@StarNewsOnline.com

Lucy's 21st birthday arrived about six years earlier than expected. It arrived with less fanfare than most, simply showing up in a small box containing an over-21 identification card from her cousin who worked in a bar.Though only a sophomore in high school at the time, Lucy – which isn't her real name – now had the ability to purchase alcohol and get into any bar of her choosing."We could get in a lot of trouble and some people are intimidated, but where I'm from you have to be in the bar scene to have a social life," she said. "I use it all the time, at least once a week since then."But Lucy, now a freshman at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, could soon face a greater risk when she uses her fake ID to purchase alcohol or to get into local bars and clubs.Alcoholic Beverage Control Board member and New Hanover County Commissioner Tom Wolfe and District Attorney Ben David want to remove fake IDs from the hands of Wilmington residents by enforcing a little-known law that will revoke the offender's real driver's license for a year. While at the national convention for alcohol regulators earlier this year, Wolfe heard about a law in Alaska that allowed driver's licenses to be taken away after being caught with a fake ID. He wondered if North Carolina could implement something similar.When he looked into it, Wolfe found out that the same punishment found in Alaska has been a part of the state's Alcoholic Beverages Control Laws since 1983."The statutes on there, but nobody seemed to know about it," Wolfe said.So the commissioner contacted David, and the district attorney jumped on the idea of increasing enforcement. "If we are going to send the message that underage drinking isn't tolerated downtown or at the beach, then we really need to see that through with the enforcement of these license seizures," David said.Sending this message will be primarily done at UNCW freshman orientations, meetings at Cape Fear Community College and during David's annual visits to area high schools. Wolfe said the fake ID problem really began to grow in the area about five years ago when an influx of online companies selling the forgeries popped up.A quick Internet search for "novelty identification cards" pulls up hundreds of websites in foreign countries selling fake IDs.Local law enforcement officials said these fakes can be hard to recognize. "The state puts a lot of controls on them in North Carolina to keep them from being faked. They've got the holograms on them and everything," said Col. Arch Jones with the New Hanover County Sheriff's Office. "But the machines that they do those with are available to people in other countries."Jones said law enforcement has been working with bartenders and bouncers in downtown Wilmington to recognize fake IDs, but the problem just keeps growing. "When they have a line of a hundred people to go through, they just can't look at them that closely," Jones said.David said working with the bar community in town will be essential to the success of enforcing the license seizure law."This is a growing problem. A lot of it is unreported, a bouncer seizes it and that's the end of it," David said. "I think we need to do a better job as a law enforcement community, and I'm committed to doing this, in reaching out to the bar owners and telling them that if they seize an ID, we want to know about that."At UNCW, Lucy said a lot of people just get their IDs from older students. They simply pay for the price of a duplicate license. This way, she said, "you don't have to worry about having any of the essential stuff missing on it."However, David intends for the license-seizure law to cut down on this practice.If caught using someone else's ID card, both the user and the original owner of the ID will face losing their license for one year."Of course we're concerned with underage drinking," David said. "But we're also concerned when someone is complicit in their own identity theft."The law will be enforced effective immediately in New Hanover County. While it's a statewide law, Wolfe said the rest of the state ABC Boards are waiting to see how successful it is here. Wolfe and David feel confident that implementation of these efforts will be effective and both said that if they can keep a few impaired drivers off the road as a result, they will feel that it has been a success.But Lucy doesn't agree. She feels that people who want to use fake IDs to drink will not be deterred."You just have to weigh the risk versus the reward," she said. "I don't know how effective the threat of losing your license would be on its own."